One day recently I climbed into the cockpit of a small trainer, opened the throttle, and pulled away from the ground on a routine test flight. The next day I was sitting in a space the size of an ordinary living room, with wide windows all around me. Six other men were reclining in comfortable chairs. It was a vastly different place from the cockpit of the little trainer, yet my job was exactly the same. Open the throttles and pull away from the ground. Yesterday the throttle controlled a 150-horsepower engine. Today the throttles in front of me had charge of 8,000 horsepower. The engines would drag more than 50 tons of airplane into the air when I opened them up. Or would they? This was the largest airplane ever built. Like every new design, it was bound to have “bugs” that can be found only by trying to fly it. The only way to find out what would happen was to try it. I pulled open the master throttle and the un- even rumble of the four power plants 30 feet behind me broke into a steady roar. The brakes were released and we started down the field. In a moment we had flying speed and were ready to climb, so I pulled back on the stick. Nothing happened. I pulled back still more but we stayed on the ground. Then, finally, we lifted. There was a flat spot in the elevator controls, evidently. It was a little detail that wouldn't take long to correct but it was enough to give me a momentary flutter. Up in the air I received another surprise. The monster B-19 was handling as easily as a smaller airplane. Although the wing is a tenth of an acre in area and the control surfaces are correspondingly large, the “big experiment” was easy to fly. There was a wide grin on the face of Col. James G. Taylor, the man who first proposed building the great ship and who was sitting in the navigator’s chair on this first flight. There are a lot of things about such a large plane that can’t be foretold in wind tunnel experiments and ground tests. For instance, would the great holes into which the wheels retract in the wing have a bad effect during take-off and landing? You could almost park two automobiles in each space. There was no telling whether these air traps might set up dangerous turbulences. We didn’t want to find out on this first flight because there were too many other things to be concerned with, so for the first hop these compartments were sealed with plywood and we flew with the wheels down. Later it turned out that the open wheel spaces have no appreciable effect on the plane’s performance. It takes two to two and a half months to run tests on a plane like this, of which possibly only 30 hours are spent in the air. The rest of the time is consumed in making the Shanges and adjustments to the plane that the flights suggest. All sorts of odd and unexpected things may crop up. I recall the first test flight of a big bomber several years ago. The plane looked perfect but when we got off the ground it performed very poorly and had a bad tail flutter. The test engineers on board were perplexed and worried, then one of them noticed that the de-icing boots on the leading edge of the wing were stretching and rolling in the wind. The rubber blankets were simply so large that they were flapping, spoiling the lift and setting up currents that buffeted the tail surfaces. Fastening them down in a different way, unnecessary on smaller airplanes, corrected all the troubles at once. One man alone can test a small trainer or fighter airplane but it takes a crew of 17 to study such a plane as the B-19. Five are in the flight crew and the other 12 are engineering test specialists. I'm 45 years old and have been flying and testing planes for 24 years. Even so, I went back to school before we took the new bomber off the ground. For two weeks the test crew attended lectures given by Douglas specialists. We listened to them every morning and spent the afternoons studying features on the plane itself. The B-19 is so large and is so filled with gear that it looks more like a battleship inside than an ordinary airplane. But when we graduated from ground school we could find our way around inside the plane in the dark and we knew the location and function of every part of the electric and hydraulic systems. Today the large sleeping compartment aft of the bomb bay is filled with test instruments and panels. Automatic tape recording machines, automatic cameras that snap the readings of the artificially lighted instrument dials, and even a phonograph recorder for cutting discs of the conversations of the test engineers on the plane’s interphone system, are all used. Beside the usual recording instruments there are pick-ups leading to strain gauges installed at vital points in the plane’s structure. Air pressures at many stations both inside and outside the plane are also recorded. Before we finish the job we will have tested the plane’s performance when empty, when carrying loads of up to 28 tons, at different altitudes, on two, three and four engines, and under every conceivable condition. When fully loaded the plane will have a gross weight of some 80 tons. Does a plane of this size, with a wing spread of more than 200 feet, represent the practical limits of airplane construction? Not in my opinion. I think that today we have reached the harbor craft stage in airplane sizes and that in the future we may travel in giant airplanes equal, in this comparison, to large ocean liners. The wings of the big planes of the future will be so thick that we will be able to place many engines on each propeller shaft, using 10,000 horsepower or several times that amount to turn each propeller. The 500-passenger airplane or a plane of two or three times that capacity, the population of a small town, will be built as soon as there is a need for it. Such planes will have room enough inside for passengers to dance their way across country to the music of the plane’s own orchestra. As bombers these giant planes will be such powerful weapons that today's mightiest bombers will seem like toy air rifles loaded with BB shot compared to them.